Syncope (phonology)


In phonology, syncope is the loss of one or more sounds from the interior of a word, especially the loss of an unstressed vowel. It is found in both synchronic and diachronic analyses of languages. Its opposite, whereby sounds are added, is epenthesis.

Synchronic analysis

Synchronic analysis studies linguistic phenomena at one moment of a language's history, usually the present, in contrast to diachronic analysis, which studies a language's states and the patterns of change across a historical timeframe. In modern languages, syncope occurs in inflection, poetry, and informal speech.

Inflections

In languages such as Irish and Hebrew, the process of inflection can cause syncope:
Verbs:
  • Irish: imir should become *imirím. However, the addition of the -ím causes syncope and the second-last syllable vowel i is lost so imirim becomes imrím.
  • Hebrew:, wrote, becomes, wrote, when the third-person plural ending ־וּ is added.
Nouns:
If the present root form in Irish is the result of diachronic syncope, synchronic syncope for inflection is prevented.

As a poetic device

Sounds may be removed from the interior of a word as a rhetorical or poetic device: for embellishment or for the sake of the meter.
  • Latin > poetic commōrat
  • English hastening > poetic hast'ning
  • English heaven > poetic heav'n
  • English over > poetic o'er
  • English ever > poetic e'er, often confused with ''ere''

Informal speech

Various sorts of colloquial reductions might be called "syncope" or "compression".
Contractions in English such as "didn't" or "can't" are typically cases of syncope.
  • English Australian > colloquial Strine, pronounced
  • English did not > didn't, pronounced
  • English I would have > I'd've, pronounced
  • English going to > colloquial gonna, pronounced or, before a vowel,
  • English library pronounced as

Diachronic analysis

In historical phonology, the term "syncope" is often limited to the loss of an unstressed vowel, in effect collapsing the syllable that contained it: trisyllabic Latin calidus develops as bisyllabic caldo in several Romance languages.

Loss of any sound

Loss of unstressed vowel

A syncope rule has been identified in Tonkawa, an extinct American Indian language in which the second vowel of a word was deleted unless it was adjacent to a consonant cluster or a final consonant.